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A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

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Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#231

Post by mulmen »

necovek wrote: post #208
mulmen wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder what it does in common situations, like stop-and-go traffic with two streets joining at an angle, where one has to yield? Plan a better route? I can’t picture the situation you describe. Yielding traffic just… yields. When there’s an opening they take it. On my ride the Waymo took a right turn on red. How is the situation you describe different? Do you still yield unnecessarily when there are cars behind y…

I was talking about a case where there are cars behind me. And it's "unnecessarily" only legally, but most drivers understand this as a driving etiquette in congested traffic. Picture two streets joining together, both with long lines of vehicles in them. One of them has right of way, the other one doesn't. When everyone drives "passively aggressively" (like Waymo is being described to), an opening never shows up, an…

Ah I see, like merging on to a freeway. In Washington the law is actually to zipper merge (take turns) so I would expect Waymo to do that.

It’s a good question and I’m not sure what Waymo would do there. Based on my limited experience I expect it would navigate that situation correctly. The bias is to go (safely), not wait for perfect conditions.

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#232

Post by rglullis »

Dalewyn wrote: post #179
rglullis wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole thing with self-driving cars is that it feels like the story of NASA's space pen. All this money being poured into a technology that would not be needed if the richest country in the world had the common sense of simply getting rid of its car dependency and developed proper public transit infrastructure.

>developed proper public transit infrastructure. No amount of public transport can accomodate the personal whims and demands of anyone let alone everyone. Even Japan, famous for its public transport infrastructure, still has a healthy population of drivers both in metro and rural areas.

Nice strawman.

I am not saying to get rid of cars altogether. I am saying that it would be better (and cheaper) for everyone if we took all those resources being out into "autonomous vehicles" and developed public transit first. Reduce the amount of yearly trips that are done by car. Provide alternatives.

The important thing about Japan or Europe is not "they don't have cars", but "people make 3-4x less trips by car compared with the alternative modes of transportation". If you want to have safer roads (in a way that doesn't give even more power to tech companies) the best way to do it is by simply reducing the amount of trips taken.

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#233

Post by necovek »

myrmidon wrote: post #191
necovek wrote: post #146

This sounds quite a bit like massaging statistics until you get the numbers you like. A few things that pop to mind: did we exclude drivers who were not eligible to drive (under the influence, no valid driving permit, cars with issues [braking broken]...)? (This mostly matters for evaluating the average performance compared to average non-impaired human — a drunk person might mess up with self-driving vehicle sensors…

Regarding drivers that are drunk or otherwise driving illegally-- why would you want to exclude them from such a study, if you can not exclude them from real traffic? If our current system of checks and incentives is not able to keep them off the road, then you need to take them and the accidents they cause into account when comparing driving safety with an autonomous system. Also note that the margins are too big, s…

Because they don't disappear even with half the non-illegal vehicles being autonomous — some crashes also happen due to avoidance manoeuvres.

So the fairer comparison would be to say that if existing SDVs were instead being driven by human drivers, we would have seen ~60 property claims more and ~40 bodily injury claims more (forgot the exact numbers from the paper), which is what, like 0.1% improvement in claims overall (certainly still a great result for the small comparative number of miles travelled, but doesn't jump off the page really).

But because the miles traveled are so far apart, nothing is really a "fair" comparison.

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#234

Post by jillesvangurp »

ZacnyLos wrote: post #81
mindvirus wrote: post #79

I think insurance prices will drive adoption of self driving very quickly. Consider: if a non-self driving car is in an accident with a self driving car, it'll almost always be the non-self driving car at fault. And with the telemetry from the self-driving car, they can prove it too, so accidents that would have been no-fault or shared fault become fully the non-self driving cars fault. And so I think insurance for n…

Outside of mapped and heavily driven teritory? Good luck.

The world is pretty well mapped at this point I don't think this will be a showstopper.

And the nice thing about driver less cars is that they can drive wherever and whenever pretty cheaply. There's no driver to pay. Just the electricity bill for charging the vehicle and some servicing/vehicle depreciation and other fixed cost. That's a race to the bottom in terms of cost.

There's no good economical reason to limit this to just small areas. You might charge passengers a bit extra if they are further out or even for the distance the car has to drive to pick them up. But there's no good reason for that to be very expensive as it would be with a paid driver.

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#235

Post by mulmen »

rglullis wrote: post #144
gizmondo wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Switzerland which has a reputation for having good public transport. Still own a car because in many cases you can't beat convenience. Can't wait for Waymo to come here.

> Still own a car because in many cases you can't beat convenience What about the places where people own cars not because it is the better choice, but the only choice?

Then self driving vehicles will be a new choice.

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#236

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

zurfer wrote: post #25

It seems like they compared apples to apples. Which make that an exciting result! “The benchmark was calibrated using both mileage (driving exposure) and residence zip-code (geographic region). Specifically, only the claims associated with vehicles registered to addresses (i.e., where the insured resides) within Waymo’s operating zip codes in San Francisco, the Phoenix metropolitan region, Los Angeles, and Austin wer…

>> “Including freeway driving makes this benchmark crash rate artificially lower, so, by including freeways in this study’s benchmark, the benchmark crash rate underestimates the true driving risk of where the Waymo ADS operates.” Page 26

Except of course if Waymo would crash a lot more in freeways, which we can't assume won't happen just because human drivers don't. Far from this making human drivers look better it makes the comparison unequal and for that reason, uninformative.

Half of those apples are orange and smell like citrus fruits.

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#237

Post by lucianbr »

guappa wrote: post #207
lucianbr wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the place?

The Catania area of course is one example.

> More recently, light snowfalls occurred on 9 February 2015, 6 January 2017 and 5 January 2019, but the last heavy snowfall dates back to 17 December 1988.

Says wikipedia. Yeah, I don't know what I expected. Of course there's no actual snow in the meditteranean. It "lightly snowed" 3 times in the last 10 years.

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#238

Post by rglullis »

mulmen wrote: post #221
rglullis wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> limited amount of time in the day For trips shorter than 2 miles, I can bet you that it's faster for me to hop on my bike (or to find an electric scooter) and get to my destination than it is to drive. And let's not even talk about the time to find parking.

The grocery store is 1.3 miles from here but it’s a 300’ climb and it’s 42f and raining right now. Even with my e-bike that’s not pleasant. On a conventional bike that’s unrealistic for all but the most hardcore cyclists. There’s a bus that serves that route but the stop is uncovered and service is unreliable because it’s immediately after a rest stop where the human drivers take care of their biological needs. A rob…

> stop is uncovered and service is reliable

And it doesn't even occur to you that the problem is the poor infrastructure? Do you honestly think that the optimal solution here is just to keep waiting for some trillion dollar corporation to be able to sell some new product that will bring you more "convenience" (at the cost of dependency and yet-more environmental costs related to cars and its required parking infrastructure) when you instead could be doing something like, I don't know, getting your city council to improve the fucking bus service?

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#239

Post by [deleted] »

Aeolun wrote: post #220
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tokyo does pretty well with purely public transport. There’s still cars of course, but you don’t use them for travel into the city proper if you don’t hate yourself Japan has .67 vehicles per person, almost 80% America's .85 [1] and above many European countries. They travel about a fifth as many miles per capita as America [2]. But again, four fifths and a fifth. Nowhere close to zero. There isn't a developed econ…

Hence why I’m talking about Tokyo. Not Japan. Living in the countryside basically requires a car by definition. People also often have a car, but don’t use it that much. Maybe you’ll get more interesting numbers if you compare miles traveled per person? Found only for 1997, but increases the discrepancy to 1:2.5 : https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar4.htm

[deleted]

Re: A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

#240

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Aeolun wrote: post #220
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tokyo does pretty well with purely public transport. There’s still cars of course, but you don’t use them for travel into the city proper if you don’t hate yourself Japan has .67 vehicles per person, almost 80% America's .85 [1] and above many European countries. They travel about a fifth as many miles per capita as America [2]. But again, four fifths and a fifth. Nowhere close to zero. There isn't a developed econ…

Hence why I’m talking about Tokyo. Not Japan. Living in the countryside basically requires a car by definition. People also often have a car, but don’t use it that much. Maybe you’ll get more interesting numbers if you compare miles traveled per person? Found only for 1997, but increases the discrepancy to 1:2.5 : https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar4.htm

> I’m talking about Tokyo. Not Japan

Tokyo would have a tough time existing in a world without cars, trucks or roads. Its economy depends on that access.

There is no tradeoff between self-driving cars and a multi-trillion dollar infrastructure rebuild.

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